00:00Less than a
00:05square kilometer of land blown apart by more than 500 mine
00:10Explorers
00:10Explosions
00:11In four horrific years of endless combat
00:15This is Vauquois, one of the worst killing fields of the First World War.
00:20A conflict that began on a hilltop and took 15,000 men's lives.
00:25As the war took a tactical turn toward the darkest depths of the Earth.
00:30A conflict that began on a hilltop and took 15,000 men's lives.
00:35So, let's go.
00:55There is nothing left of the French village of Volcois.
00:58In its place, there is just this death.
01:03It is often forgotten that here...
01:08Most of the Great War was fought underground.
01:12For four years...
01:13German and French miners dug a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers with the salt...
01:18and his strong aim of blowing each other to pieces.
01:23Its strategic...
01:24spelt its destruction
01:29Andy Hawkins and Julia Richardson of the British Archaeological Association, the Duran
01:34Land Group, have come to meet one of Germany's foremost experts on the battle.
01:39Adolf Buchner. Buchner and his son visit regularly to explore
01:44existing tunnels from the era.
01:48You can hardly believe
01:49this village was here on this spot.
01:53Now you can only
01:54see the craters.
01:55What you can also observe is that there were no
01:59trees around here. This explains that once the
02:04German or the French were here standing around having a view in all direction.
02:09Thousands of French and German soldiers died at
02:14as each side tried to control the hill. In the horrific stalemate,
02:19tunnelers on both sides blew a total of no less than 539
02:24mines underneath the spot where a quiet village once stood.
02:29It's been estimated that in the first six
02:34months a battle 8,000 French and 6,300 Germans died.
02:39So you see, on a small area, 100 metres wide, it's enormous.
02:44Thinkable in our day and age.
02:49The first real
02:50The first real
02:54Mine warfare explosion was done on the 13th of May.
02:59Until 1915, there were two German explosions and one French one.
03:04And from that, the mine warfare started really, until the last...
03:09The first explosion was a German one, it was on the 9th of...
03:14...April 1918.
03:17Adolf Buchner has privately...
03:19...published the diary of one of the protagonists of this battle, Hermann Hoppe.
03:24A German pioneer specialized in siege warfare tunneling and explosives.
03:29And...
03:30...and, yeah, darin spielt da Hermann Hoppe also die Hauptrolle, klar, die ist sein Tag.
03:33It is...
03:34...interesting...
03:35...because it gives us a glimpse of the life of the sapper.
03:38...
03:39...and it shows the differences between the lives of a sapper and a sapper engineer and an infant...
03:44...and the infantrymen.
03:45...Ingenieurskorps...
03:46...and the Infanterie.
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